Solution: Win 7 Clone

The only software i have found so far that will support clone creation
the way I needed it is EaseUS ToDo. Very much more versitile than
others.

I got ambitious and put the empty SSD in the laptop and connected the
1T HDD through a USB3 adapter. *the Toshiba has no access door for the
battery and the HDD. THere were about 20 screws to remove. Also,
putting the back on was a puzzle. You need to pull the DVD out (it is
loose after the back screws are removed). Put the back on. It has a
few little snap-ins. Then slide the DVD in and make sure the plate on
the end of the DVD lines up under the back cover at a screw hole as a
single screw holds the DVD in, then put all the other screws in. Not
too bad just different. At least I know that if I have to replace the
battery some day, it will not be too difficult.

ToDo allowed me to clone from a large, mostly empty partition to the
new SSD. However it was not straight forward and required hare pulling
(I don't have hair so the rabbit have to do, lol).

I tried to clone all partitions BUT after doing so the SSD was not
bootable since it placed the HDD active partiton as the secondary
partition on the SSD. ToDo split the SSD into two almost equal parts.
yes it has partition sizing but I could not get the C: smaller only the
secondary SSD partition was allowed to resize. maybe i just did not
figure that out. Had to drag things around with no real instructions.
Anyway i got the full EaseUS partition tool and will try with that.

I tried to get the BIOS to help but the SSD secondary partition was not
there.

So I next tried their ToDo partition at a time feature and was able to
direct ToDo to clone from the HDD Active (C to the soon to be SSD
active (C.
That worked and I am able to boot from the SSD. hooray.

But it also did someting to the recovery partition on the SSD that was
originally cloned there.

So now I have downloaded EaseSU Partiton (paid version, yes I do spend
money past the free stuff) and am about to install that and try to get
the SSD partition the way I want.

And yes the SSD is very fast, like 10X faster that the HDD.
I even tried SSD to USB very fast pen drive. Wow!

i also purchase the EaseUS Backup since they gave me half off for both
the Partition Mgr and Backup sw. Came to about $35.

I made a Win 7 pre-install backup. It took six 4.7G DVDs.
I made a Win 7 post-install and startup backup. I took three 4.7G
DVDs.
The Win 7 system partition was about 36GBytes,

As an aside, this Win 7 pro is actually much improved over the other
older PC win Win 7 pro. I wish i could get all that onto the old PC.
Yes, all updates are done.

-----
Macrium Reflect Free and Paragon just could not do what I needed.
Even the Samsung software that came with the drive could not help.

i did load the Samsung software and check the drive and optimize the
SSD for Windows and my liking (higher reliability). That all went
smoothly.

BTW ToDo was free.

Thanks to all who gave me suggestions.



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

On 2/03/2014, OldGuy posted:
The only software i have found so far that will support clone
creation the way I needed it is EaseUS ToDo. Very much more
versitile than others.

I got ambitious and put the empty SSD in the laptop and connected the
1T HDD through a USB3 adapter. *the Toshiba has no access door for
the battery and the HDD. THere were about 20 screws to remove.
Also, putting the back on was a puzzle. You need to pull the DVD out
(it is loose after the back screws are removed). Put the back on.
It has a few little snap-ins. Then slide the DVD in and make sure
the plate on the end of the DVD lines up under the back cover at a
screw hole as a single screw holds the DVD in, then put all the other
screws in. Not too bad just different. At least I know that if I
have to replace the battery some day, it will not be too difficult.

ToDo allowed me to clone from a large, mostly empty partition to the
new SSD. However it was not straight forward and required hare
pulling (I don't have hair so the rabbit have to do, lol).

I tried to clone all partitions BUT after doing so the SSD was not
bootable since it placed the HDD active partiton as the secondary
partition on the SSD. ToDo split the SSD into two almost equal
parts.
yes it has partition sizing but I could not get the C: smaller only
the secondary SSD partition was allowed to resize. maybe i just did
not figure that out. Had to drag things around with no real
instructions. Anyway i got the full EaseUS partition tool and will
try with that.

I tried to get the BIOS to help but the SSD secondary partition was
not there.

So I next tried their ToDo partition at a time feature and was able
to direct ToDo to clone from the HDD Active (C to the soon to be
SSD active (C.
That worked and I am able to boot from the SSD. hooray.

But it also did someting to the recovery partition on the SSD that
was originally cloned there.

So now I have downloaded EaseSU Partiton (paid version, yes I do
spend money past the free stuff) and am about to install that and try
to get the SSD partition the way I want.

And yes the SSD is very fast, like 10X faster that the HDD.
I even tried SSD to USB very fast pen drive. Wow!

i also purchase the EaseUS Backup since they gave me half off for
both the Partition Mgr and Backup sw. Came to about $35.

I made a Win 7 pre-install backup. It took six 4.7G DVDs.
I made a Win 7 post-install and startup backup. I took three 4.7G
DVDs.
The Win 7 system partition was about 36GBytes,

As an aside, this Win 7 pro is actually much improved over the other
older PC win Win 7 pro. I wish i could get all that onto the old PC.
Yes, all updates are done.

-----
Macrium Reflect Free and Paragon just could not do what I needed.
Even the Samsung software that came with the drive could not help.

i did load the Samsung software and check the drive and optimize the
SSD for Windows and my liking (higher reliability). That all went
smoothly.

BTW ToDo was free.

Thanks to all who gave me suggestions.

And thanks for this report, the story of your odyssey :-)

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:01:29 -0800, OldGuy wrote:

The only software i have found so far that will support clone creation
the way I needed it is EaseUS ToDo. Very much more versitile than
others.

snip

Macrium Reflect Free and Paragon just could not do what I needed.

I have a strong feeling that both Macrium and Paragon can do what you needed
to do. It's just unfortunate that you didn't find the right options.

Fortunately, you found a solution that worked, so kudos for hanging in
there.

--

Char Jackson

Char Jackson wrote:
On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:01:29 -0800, OldGuy wrote:

The only software i have found so far that will support clone creation
the way I needed it is EaseUS ToDo. Very much more versitile than
others.

snip

Macrium Reflect Free and Paragon just could not do what I needed.

I have a strong feeling that both Macrium and Paragon can do what you needed
to do. It's just unfortunate that you didn't find the right options.

Fortunately, you found a solution that worked, so kudos for hanging in
there.


Macrium can. You have to use the WinPE rescue CD to get it.
I've had the necessary dialog up on my screen here.

Paul

Char Jackson wrote:
Macrium can. You have to use the WinPE rescue CD to get it.
I've had the necessary dialog up on my screen here.

Paul

I will not clone from a larger partition to a smaller partition.
I tried it and it said it could not do that.



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

OldGuy wrote:
Char Jackson wrote:
Macrium can. You have to use the WinPE rescue CD to get it.
I've had the necessary dialog up on my screen here.

Paul

I will not clone from a larger partition to a smaller partition.
I tried it and it said it could not do that.


Sure it will. Macrium 5.2 build 6444, from a WAIK/WinPE rescue CD.
128GB drive to 16GB drive. All done in a virtual machine.
Note the red circle at the bottom, which is a hint at what
subset of disk configurations can be handled. The tool only
handles "big partition on the right, shrink it" type
configurations. That's what the hint is telling me.

http://i57.tinypic.com/2qa3dc2.gif

The large partition must be the one on the end.
Take this four partition cloning candidate. This one will work.
Macrium can shrink the one on the right, to fit a smaller
device, without needing too much GUI design in the process.
Nothing serious is being done.

+-------+-------+-------+------------------------------+
| Small | Small | Small | Large |
+-------+-------+-------+------------------------------+

And this one won't work. Why ?

+-------+-------+------------------------------+-------+
| Small | Small | Large | Small |
+-------+-------+------------------------------+-------+

In the second case, a human eyeballs it and says "it's so
simple, shrink the large one, move the fourth one on the right,
over a bit, done". But the tool cannot autonomously do
what amounts to full partition management, on a whim. The
developers would have to write a Partition Manager API,
allowing the user to agree or disagree with the proposed
changes. In addition, moving partitions around might change
partition numbers, and require ARC paths to be corrected in
boot.ini or something. There are a few side effects that come
with full Partition Management functionality. The infrastructure
in the tool, doesn't prevent this - it *could* make grand
changes if it wanted to, as it has all the tools needed to
do so. But, they'd have to run a GUI with Partition Manager
controls, on the WinPE disc.

Nothing prevents the user from doing their own
Partition Management first. You *could* convert the second
picture to the first. But, if you do that, you the user
bear all of the risk. If you foul up the original disk,
while playing with it, or there are some future consequences,
it's then on your head. Which is why I might do a backup copy
of the original disk, if I thought I might need it at some
future date. I have several terabytes of backups here, with
around 2TB of remaining space when I need it. Some snapshots
are as much as two years old. Just in case.

You have to know what the small partitions are doing,
whether their position is important to the future, to
know whether "pre-partition-management" is the answer.

Paul

Macrium Reflect Free 5.2
As I recall the message was "Insufficient Space"
This was from the Win PE booted CD.
Which version of MRF and which of WinPE are you using?
One of us may have an older version that did or did not support.



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

OldGuy wrote:
Macrium Reflect Free 5.2
As I recall the message was "Insufficient Space"
This was from the Win PE booted CD.
Which version of MRF and which of WinPE are you using?
One of us may have an older version that did or did not support.

The "Insufficient Space" means that the very simplest operation
of "shrink the right-most partition", can't work. I would not
expect the tool to modify multiple partitions (shrink and move).
That would require a Partition Management type GUI in the tool,
so the user could aid the program to make the right decision.
It is Partition Management tradition, to take "baby steps"
when messing with partitions. The intention is to not
do anything, that leaves the user cursing and swearing later :-)

If you have small-small-large-small, shrinking the small one
on the right, isn't going to save any significant space.

If you posted a screenshot of Disk Management, with the
Free Space column resized so it is readable, it may be
possible to tell just from looking at it, what the problem
is with the layout. And, why the tool failed.

Macrium 5.2 build 6444, WinPE3

Also, if the small one on the right happens to be
SYSTEM RESERVED, you can follow the recipe for rolling
that into C:, and just delete the partition completely.
That would leave you with small-small-large, and a perfect
candidate for cloning with Macrium. I did that to my laptop,
but the purpose was to gain a partition for other uses.

How to Remove the Windows "System Reserved" Partition
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409

Paul

It happens that Paul formulated :
OldGuy wrote:
The "Insufficient Space" means that the very simplest operation
of "shrink the right-most partition", can't work. I would not
expect the tool to modify multiple partitions (shrink and move).
That would require a Partition Management type GUI in the tool,
so the user could aid the program to make the right decision.
It is Partition Management tradition, to take "baby steps"
when messing with partitions. The intention is to not
do anything, that leaves the user cursing and swearing later :-)

If you have small-small-large-small, shrinking the small one
on the right, isn't going to save any significant space.

If you posted a screenshot of Disk Management, with the
Free Space column resized so it is readable, it may be
possible to tell just from looking at it, what the problem
is with the layout. And, why the tool failed.

Macrium 5.2 build 6444, WinPE3

Also, if the small one on the right happens to be
SYSTEM RESERVED, you can follow the recipe for rolling
that into C:, and just delete the partition completely.
That would leave you with small-small-large, and a perfect
candidate for cloning with Macrium. I did that to my laptop,
but the purpose was to gain a partition for other uses.

How to Remove the Windows "System Reserved" Partition
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409

Paul

Maybe so, but now I am beyond that since ToDo did the job all be it
with a little struggle. I wound up with a C: ERecovery) FData) and
a additional hidden (Recovery) no drive letter. I am not sure how I
duplicated the Recovery but there it is and all seems OK.

But now I want to divide the C: at 250G into two at 125G each.
Nothing seems to want to do that. And now that WIn 7 does not provide
the picture of the partition contents I cannot tell if the partition
has unmoveable files keeping the partition large or what is going on.
I tried EaseUS Partition tool but it failed to split C:.
I did defrag and that did not help.

OldGuy wrote:
It happens that Paul formulated :
OldGuy wrote:
The "Insufficient Space" means that the very simplest operation
of "shrink the right-most partition", can't work. I would not
expect the tool to modify multiple partitions (shrink and move).
That would require a Partition Management type GUI in the tool,
so the user could aid the program to make the right decision.
It is Partition Management tradition, to take "baby steps"
when messing with partitions. The intention is to not
do anything, that leaves the user cursing and swearing later :-)

If you have small-small-large-small, shrinking the small one
on the right, isn't going to save any significant space.

If you posted a screenshot of Disk Management, with the
Free Space column resized so it is readable, it may be
possible to tell just from looking at it, what the problem
is with the layout. And, why the tool failed.

Macrium 5.2 build 6444, WinPE3

Also, if the small one on the right happens to be
SYSTEM RESERVED, you can follow the recipe for rolling
that into C:, and just delete the partition completely.
That would leave you with small-small-large, and a perfect
candidate for cloning with Macrium. I did that to my laptop,
but the purpose was to gain a partition for other uses.

How to Remove the Windows "System Reserved" Partition
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409

Paul

Maybe so, but now I am beyond that since ToDo did the job all be it with
a little struggle. I wound up with a C: ERecovery) FData) and a
additional hidden (Recovery) no drive letter. I am not sure how I
duplicated the Recovery but there it is and all seems OK.

But now I want to divide the C: at 250G into two at 125G each. Nothing
seems to want to do that. And now that WIn 7 does not provide the
picture of the partition contents I cannot tell if the partition has
unmoveable files keeping the partition large or what is going on. I
tried EaseUS Partition tool but it failed to split C:.
I did defrag and that did not help.

Install the trial version of Raxco PerfectDisk.
The defragmenter there, can move metadata files.
That's how, as a joke, I was able to get the C:
partition on my laptop, down to 40GB, from 320GB.
Use the Windows shrink, run a defrag, run shrink again,
defrag again, and you should be able to make it
as small as the remaining files in usage :-)

Once it has shrunk, make your new partition.

Paul

Paul formulated the question :
OldGuy wrote:
Install the trial version of Raxco PerfectDisk.
The defragmenter there, can move metadata files.
That's how, as a joke, I was able to get the C:
partition on my laptop, down to 40GB, from 320GB.
Use the Windows shrink, run a defrag, run shrink again,
defrag again, and you should be able to make it
as small as the remaining files in usage :-)

Once it has shrunk, make your new partition.

Paul

I assume you are saying there are two methods: use PerfectDisk or use
Windows Shrink and defrag ...
Not being familiar with either.

OldGuy wrote:
Paul formulated the question :
OldGuy wrote:
Install the trial version of Raxco PerfectDisk.
The defragmenter there, can move metadata files.
That's how, as a joke, I was able to get the C:
partition on my laptop, down to 40GB, from 320GB.
Use the Windows shrink, run a defrag, run shrink again,
defrag again, and you should be able to make it
as small as the remaining files in usage :-)

Once it has shrunk, make your new partition.

Paul

I assume you are saying there are two methods: use PerfectDisk or use
Windows Shrink and defrag ...
Not being familiar with either.



The defragmenter in this case, moves the stuff sitting
at the 50% point in the partition, to one side. But, it doesn't
move it far enough over. So, you defrag first, which
moves things over. Then, go to Disk Management, and
run the shrink thing. Now, the next time you defragment,
it moves the "blocking" metadata a little further to
the left. Which allows the shrink thing in Disk Management,
to shrink the partition a bit more.

It simply refuses to slam all the stuff to the left.
That's why you have to go through the cycle more than
once. Tools like JKDefrag can slam things to the left,
but very few tools can move all the metadata. So we
take what we can get. Most tools will use the Microsoft
defrag API, to move things, and it's just possible
there are limits on what that will move. Leaving fewer
programs with custom code, to do the rest. I don't
really know how the Raxco product is doing this. There
are some things that should be pretty hard to move (as
they're in use at the time). If a file system is offline,
then it's easy to move stuff around. But pretty hard to
do such a thing, for the running OS C: partition.

I'd read about this, as a solution, so decided to
give it a try. At the time, the OS partition might have
had 26GB of files or so, and I shrank the partition
to 40GB (14GB slack). Leaving lots of space for a data partition.
It took a couple of uses of each tool, to get it that small.

And since you don't shrink C: every day, you'll only need the
trial version of Raxco, and won't need it afterwards.

And there should be third-party Partition Managers that
can do this as well. There are some free ones of those
around, but I don't know all their capabilities from memory.
Before using a free partition manager, I usually do a
fair amount of Googling, to make sure the product won't
break anything. For example, one free partition manager,
a user managed to break a FAT32 partition when using it.
Which should be one of the easier ones to change.

Paul

In my case the C: partition after several attempts with Shrink and0
defragging only got down from 250G to 130G. So with ToDo and a lot of
resizing and moving of partitions I got close to what I wanted.
I will keep JKDefrag in mind.

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 17:48:42 -0500, Paul wrote:

Install the trial version of Raxco PerfectDisk.
The defragmenter there, can move metadata files.
That's how, as a joke, I was able to get the C:
partition on my laptop, down to 40GB, from 320GB.
Use the Windows shrink, run a defrag, run shrink again,
defrag again, and you should be able to make it
as small as the remaining files in usage :-)

Once it has shrunk, make your new partition.

I think I just threw up a little, because that, in a nutshell, is why
Windows shrink is a complete joke. Partition managers since the early 1990's
have been able to resize partitions without bothering the user with any of
that metadata file nonsense.

If a real partition manager ever pulled that crap, I hope it would get
mentioned here so that others could avoid it. Fortunately, I don't know of
any that are as poor at their job as the Windows tool is.

--

Char Jackson

On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:01:29 -0800, OldGuy wrote:

The only software i have found so far that will support clone creation
the way I needed it is EaseUS ToDo. Very much more versitile than
others.

-----
Macrium Reflect Free and Paragon just could not do what I needed.

I just downloaded and installed Macrium Reflect Free and attempted to create
an image of a larger volume (with plenty of free space) onto a smaller
volume, and it worked without issues.

The option you were looking for is called "Intelligent Sector Copy
(Recommended" and it's located in the Compression section of the Advanced
Settings area when you're starting a new image task. In my case, it was
already selected by default. I suspect you simply didn't see the "Advanced
Options" message in the lower left of your screen. It's in blue clickable
text on a white screen, but I suppose a person in a hurry could miss it.

Bottom line, the capability has been there all along. I can't speak for
Paragon since it's been too long since I've used it, but I strongly suspect
it can do the task, as well.

This is just for the record. I know you've moved on.

--

Char Jackson